Touch. It's an ancient, powerful way of social communication. The first one that comes on board fully mature, and the last one to leave us when we die. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe, and we are in the middle of a scientific revolution to understand its inner workings. Join us for a conversation with world-renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester.
I am Dr. John Foxe, Director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, and you are listening to Neuroscience Prospectives. Welcome everybody to another episode of Neuroscience Prospectives. It is just wonderful to have my guest here today. Her name is Katelang Gotthard. She goes by the name Katy, so we'll call her Katy from now on, if that's okay.
She's a neuroscientist working really in what we would call social neuroscience, and we're going to have a really great conversation about an epic journey to being a neuroscientist working on this super critical issue. Let me start with a question. A lot of people watching won't be card-carrying neuroscientists. When I say to people sometimes, oh, I have friends who are studying emotions and sociability, and they go, science can't study that. It's too squishy. It's too psychological a construct.
But there's a hard science to this, and you're in the trenches on that. But would you speak to that issue? I think everything that can be quantified, everything that can be objectively measured, is fair game for science. It's hard to measure these things because we're used to human psychology, where we work on subjective report and self-report, which is flawed. But working with animals gives you an extraordinary opportunity to actually measure behavior,
measure what the brain evolved to do. And that measurement gives you an anchor into objectivity. Also, you can measure the physiological responses of the body. Throughout all the creatures, you can measure how the body adjusts physiologically to the behavioral agenda of the organism. And that is also an objective and uncontestable and interpretable piece of evidence. And then there are specific brain circuits for this as well, right?
So there's an objective truth there that you've spent a lot of time delving into. Yes. So I work in the amygdala. And you know, it's a funny thing is that when I finished my PhD, I worked in the hippocampus, then I went over to a different laboratory to do my post-docs. And my advisor said, well, just work a little bit on the amygdala, and then you can get back to your beloved hippocampus.
Well, I never got back because this globe of nerves in your brain is the most fascinating piece of brain that I could ever sort of fell in love with because it's coordinating all the feelings that you have, all the emotions that you experience, everything that is of value to you, everything that matters to you, all the social interactions that you have, they somehow connect there. And they also coordinate the responses of your body to all these emotional situations, all the social situations.
So by itself, it's like a mini brain. It takes information in, it interprets, it gives it meaning, and then it generates an output, which is your behavior, some observable and some not, like your heart rate right now. Fear, anger, psychopathy, autism, all related, many, many constructs around social interaction, social interaction, dysfunction, all in this very specialized hub in the brain.
Yes, I would actually, it is a hub. So if you fly Delta Airlines, you have to go to Atlanta to get from one part of the country to the other. So the amygdala is kind of like this Atlanta for Delta Airlines. You have to go there in order to get somewhere else. The amygdala doesn't do it by itself. It just have a couple million neurons, but they're so interconnected.
There's so many loops that intersect there that there's hardly an important mental function that does not involve somehow the amygdala. Well, let's go back to you and where you came from and how you came to work in this specialized area of neuroscience on feelings and emotions. You're not from the United States, so you're going to give us a little bit of your story.
So I was born and raised in Romania, but I am Hungarian ethnically, which doesn't really make a difference because in Transylvania, the part of Romania that I come from, Romanians and Hungarians and Germans and Slavs, cohabitated for a long time. And I did not start out at all in science. I was actually trained in a special art school that prepared ballerinas for the National Ballet. And I studied classical dance there until an illness forced me to quit.
And I had an uncle who was a psychiatrist, and I was really depressed. And his idea of therapy was to take me to the hospital and show me all the patients with all the different illnesses and all the different suffering. And he said, then, what's your problem? And so I decided right there and then to become a physician.
And then through medical school, I realized that there's all kinds of suffering, all kinds of human suffering, but there's nothing that compares to the suffering that our own brain can inflict on us. I never recall a day when I decided I will be a neuroscientist. It just grew to the point that at some point it was inevitable. And when I realized that I had a chance to study neuroscience, I pivoted, I moved immediately. I went to the second IBRO meeting that was organized in 1986 in Budapest.
I met there John Hildebrand, who was the founder. So IBRO is International Brain Research Organization, which is a very important organization for many people, especially in Europe. It's a world organization. And this is in the late 80s when the communist regimes were starting to fall apart.
And the organizers of the International Brain Research Organization, the organizers of this congress, deliberately put that congress to Budapest because Budapest was starting to open up, starting to come away from the Soviet domination. And I think that this was exactly the idea to allow the Eastern Europeans to get in contact with Western scientists.
And I was one of those lucky ones who I happened to sit down next to John Hildebrand, who was the founder of the neuroscience program at the University of Arizona. And the rest is history. Now, really important context. I grew up in Ireland in the 1980s, and we talked about this before. I grew up in a country where there was a war, not at the same level that you were growing up.
But that context for your life around an interest in human suffering comes out of a really difficult time in Romanian history. And I know you don't even like people to mention the guy's name, but you were under this horrendous dictatorship of Ceausescu. And for people who, again, won't know about the 1980s necessarily or younger folks, the regime, that was, it wasn't just a very difficult Soviet regime. It was the worst. He was known as the worst of the worst. Yes, it was.
So it was a tough time. Yeah. So we'll just mention psychopathy at the beginning of our conversation. He was a classical psychopath, a person completely devoid of empathy and of care, a megalomaniac.
It was an interesting kind of suffering because you were hopeless and powerless, and the censorship and the monitoring of your behavior at some point turns into self-monitoring, which I think is the most dangerous, the most subversive part of this sort of complete domineering and repressive behavior towards the normal human spirit.
And being a teenager, a rebellious teenager, was incredibly difficult because our parents didn't worry about us smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol or making out under the piano. Our parents worried about telling our colleagues and our friends the discussions about politics at home around the kitchen table that would have landed them in prison. So to the censorship of there are things that you cannot say, this idea that the king has no clothes but nobody can save,
it's a very interesting sort of mental space in which people lived. We were prisoners in a country of lies, and we could not say that those were lies. And the repression was at every level in people's lives, at every level from what they ate, from how they talked to their children. Every intimate level of your life was underneath this powerful, domineering, secret, police-driven. It was one of the most brutal regimes.
And part of what drives your interest in human emotion, maybe fair to say highly dysfunctional amygdala in this particular individual. And bring us to the Romanian orphanages and where they feature in your life. Of course, they're famous in Europe, the Romanian orphanages and what happened to the children there. So this is a delicate issue, and I will not make judgment about abortion.
But one of the reasons why there were so many orphans in Romania, because contraceptives and abortions were illegal. So these children were found in train toilets and parks, and mothers ran away from the maternity wards and left their children behind. And they were put in these orphanages, and we didn't know about them until I was in my fifth year in medical school when I did my pediatrics clerkship. And I was assigned to one of these orphanages.
And it's actually a shake just by thinking about it, because there are some memories that are really, really traumatic. And the trauma is not what happens to you. The trauma is seeing suffering that you cannot intervene and empathizing with.
So at this point, of course, we didn't know what killed these children, because we didn't know that it's not just the antibiotic resistance, ear infections, and the nutrition, but the love and care and the protective embrace of a parent, the touch that these children never receive. And those images stayed with me. And when we discovered that the brain has the amygdala, has cells, has neurons that respond to touch, it changed my life. It changed the whole entire direction of the lab.
Fair to say that touch is the touchstone of your entire research operation. Right now, exactly. So we were very focused on social communication with visual signals, eye contact, facial expression. This is the work that I have done before. But now I'm fully committed to work on touch and continue this work on touch, because it took us to these fantastic territories of how we feel touch is related to our heartbeats. It's just a whole organismal experience.
And what is really beautiful about touch is that it benefits two, not only the one who receives that touch, but the giver also goes in a different mental state. It's an ancient, powerful way of social communication, the first one that comes on board fully mature and the last one to leave us when we die. You know, I was thinking about this when I was getting ready to speak with you.
And I was thinking about the three years I had three teenage, early twenties children who had to move home to our house and abandon all their friends and all their social interactions. And I have an abiding memory of this one day where my youngest daughter was, you know, we were so terrified at the beginning of COVID, of course, that she was sitting out on the front lawn and her best friends. I mean, these two children were wrapped around each other most of their lives.
You know, and I was standing on our porch going, get back 15 feet or something, you know, so that they could communicate with each other. And they there's a big, massive hole shot into the middle of their developing social lives that I think, you know, I think we're just beginning again now to realize the suffering that goes along with that. Now, obviously, we needed to make sure that they stayed alive.
That's the most important thing. But still, we're going to be dealing with the sequelae of that. Is that something that you've been thinking about as well? I actually experienced myself that touch hunger was the children of my friends because they used to run into the house and we used to hug and we used to rough and tumble with them. And all of a sudden we could just walk on the street and they were on one side of the street.
And my husband and I were on the other side of the street. And that idea of not being able to touch and hug was detrimental. And I think that the teenagers paid the highest price for the pandemic. This is now coming out. We have a whole we had for the last 10 years a youth mental health issue. Now it became a crisis. And I think that touch is going to be part of that. When it all comes out and we'll understand retrospectively really what happened.
I think the idea that we could not show affection and connectedness through this very basic primitive way that we pay the we pay the price for that. So let's go back to Romania for a minute because you in the end had managed you. I have a feeling it's a little difficult for you to keep quiet about things that you're passionate about. And so you'd manage to get yourself in the lens of the authorities and how to get out of Romania as the borders were opening up at that time.
So tell us a little bit about that. And how did that how did you manage that? So before all this revolution happened, I was caught sending information about patients to John Hildebrand to the scientists who I met at the University of Arizona. It was caught. It was translated. I was interrogated and I was not allowed to leave the city. I was actually demoted from neurosurgery to factory doctor. And then the revolution happened.
And then people who knew me in Hungary kept on sending trucks was humanitarian aid to the hospital where I worked. And one day a truck came was not a truck was kind of like a like an ambulance sort of van. Came to the hospital. They brought blood and an ethylene sterilizer and food. And then the driver told me, you're coming back with us. And I said, well, I don't have a passport. I'm not allowed to go.
You're coming back with us. So as I was in the hospital, they put me in the back, got me through the border. No, nothing packed. You did not. I didn't say goodbye to anybody. They took me from the hospital at two a.m. I crossed the border and I was still nervous even talking about this because it was very, very scary because I was thinking that because I was arrested before and interrogated, I'm on some blacklist.
And so the driver, I pretended to sleep because I didn't want them to be in trouble. So I told them, I'm just a hitchhiker and I just pretend to sleep here in the back. And, you know, you guys can throw me out so that you get in. They don't get in trouble because of me. And I was pretending to sleep in the backseat. And then at some point, the driver said, OK, now we can get out and you can kiss the land of the. You can kiss the ground because you're free.
Fantastic. Yeah, it's the stuff of movies, really. What an adventure. They were very courageous. Yeah, why not? They were very courageous. They were Red Cross workers from Hungary and Vienna. So so take us from there to Arizona. Oh, yeah. So the moment I got to Hungary, I called John Hilder when I told them that I was free. And then he arranged for me to to go and work in the laboratory of the of the National Academy of Sciences in Hungary in a neuroscience lab.
That was my first actually experience just for a couple of months until I got a travel document in which the U.S. could give me a visa, an F1 visa, because I didn't have a passport and I was not a citizen of Hungary. So I got some passport like document in which I could get an F1 visa. And then John sent me a ticket and I landed in Tucson and I became a graduate student. Yes. And I studied with John, which is an amazing story.
And then I believe you post-doc with the University of Rochester alumnus who sat in this very seat with us relatively recently, David Amaral. I post-doc with David Amaral. And again, it was absolutely fantastic. David is one of the best anatomists in the world. And I trusted him. And he was working in the hippocampus and the amygdala. And as I said, he said, just work a little bit in the amygdala now and then you can get back to hippocampus. It never happened. Let me switch gears here.
I mean, you know, you're a woman in science and I always like to ask, you know, when we have women who have been very successful in the neurosciences, I'm particularly given the extraordinary story and the grit and determination you've had to show to get to where you're at. What's your advice to a young graduate student charting a path for themselves? Be honest to yourself and know whether you really love what you're doing.
Nothing good comes out of doing something for an outcome, for the PhD, for the MD, for the this or that. If you love the doing of it, the process, it will never feel hard, even if that reward at the end gets to be a moving target, which usually it is. If you love the doing of it, if you walk into your lab or to your office and you sit down thinking, something good is going to happen today or I have to get through this so that I can do something else that I'm really looking forward to.
If you are honest to yourself and you don't force yourself to do something because you or somebody else has an expectation of you to behave or perform or do something else, you're going to be happy and it will come with a lot of good things. If you're doing it because you have a goal to achieve, it will be painful and when you achieve the goal, then what?
Well, what a pleasure to have you here. I really appreciate it and I appreciate your unvarnished stories and the extraordinary journey you've been on. I think it's a lesson to all of us and long may your amazing work go forward. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.